The invention relates to inexpensive portable washing devices of the type having a handle connected to a water hose and having a ring of bristles mounted on a rotary head powered by turbine vanes, and more particularly to mechanisms which limit rotating speed of the ring of bristles to prevent water from being thrown rapidly outward and soaking the user.
A variety of inexpensive car washing devices of the type connectable to an ordinary garden hose and providing a rotary head supporting scrubbing bristles and powered by a jet of water produced by pressurized water delivered by the hose are known. Such devices commonly include a reservoir for detergent. Some include a control valve disposed in the handle of the device. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,207,640; 4,151,624; 4,290,160; 4,461,052 are exemplary of the state of the art for such cleaning devices. FIG. 1 herein shows a typical prior art device, in which a housing 1 includes a recess in which a rotary head with vanes for receiving a pressurized jet of water 9 is mounted by means of a bearing 3 and supports a scrubbing bristle ring 4. A garden hose is attached by means of a hose connector 10 at the end of a handle 7 which includes a water passage 8 that guides the pressurized water through an orifice to produce the jet of water 9 which impinges upon the vanes of the rotary head 2. This particular device includes a stationary ring of peripheral bristles 6 attached to the outer bottom surface of housing 1. Peripheral bristles 6 act as a skirt that mainly performs the function of preventing excessive outward spraying of water from rotary bristle ring 4 as it rotates at high speed and thereby prevents the user from being soaked as he or she attempts to use the device to wash a car. Other prior art devices include plastic skirts which perform the same function as peripheral bristles 6 to prevent the user from being sprayed with water.
All of the comparable prior art devices suffer from the shortcoming that either they have a peripheral skirt or peripheral bristles which confine the amount of water that is thrown outward so that the user will not get soaked when using the device, in which case the overall size of the head is too large to allow effective scrubbing of portions of the surface of an automobile that are hard to reach, for example between the radio antenna and the adjacent surface metal, or elements of the automobile's grill, or portions of the surface near the bumpers, etc.
Despite the large number of prior inexpensive washing devices of the type described above that are available or have been proposed, there remains an unmet need for an inexpensive, washing device that (1) provides enough power to rotary bristles to adequately scrub the surface of an automobile or other object, (2) does not spray excessive amounts of water on the user during use, especially when the bristles are temporarily lifted off the surface being washed (causing the bristles to rotate much faster and thereby throw more water outwardly), and (3) is small enough to allow the bristles to be easily pressed against hard-to-get-at surfaces of the automobile or other object so that the user does not need to use another implement, such as a rag, to wash such hard-to-get-at surfaces in a separate operation.